Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

by Brett Martin

  • • •

  It was no surprise that HBO’s next act should be the western. After all, just as the auteur films of the sixties and seventies had done, the TV revolution began by inverting classic American narratives—the outlaw saga, the family drama, the cop show, and so on. In its violent, muddy revision of the ur-American myth of the frontier, Deadwood followed squarely in the tradition of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and others.

  As if to underline the point, filming took place at the Melody Ranch Motion Picture Studio, an ersatz pioneer town in the Santa Clarita Valley, once owned by Gene Autry, where such figures as Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, Gary Cooper, and the cast of Gunsmoke had applied themselves toward inventing the myth of the American West. The set would be soaked down every day before shooting, to create the appropriately primordial slurry of mud, blood, and manure from which Deadwood imagined civilization lurching spasmodically to life. The pilot was directed by the great western director Walter Hill.

  One of Milch’s great themes was the loss of religious ritual as the central organizing principle of the modern world—and what flows into that vacuum to replace it. Without the Church in any of its myriad manifestations, he seemed to feel, we are so many children in the wilderness, oyster spat drifting in search of something to attach to. This both was the subject of Deadwood—as the muddy community groped fitfully toward some kind of organization—and, to his mind, what explained the moment in history that allowed the show to exist, at the expense of what had once been the dominant mode of popular entertainment: film.

  “The whole idea of going out to a movie was really a secularized version of going to church. And there was a certain expectation you brought to the movies which has taken all this time to be demystified,” he said. (Or perhaps still hadn’t been: David Chase still liked to invoke the idea of the movie theater as “cathedral,” long after multiplexes had become more like parking garages, at best.)

  In Deadwood, South Dakota, outside the “churches” of the law and country, in Indian territory, the most potent religious symbol in 1876 was yellow and glittery and found in surrounding streams. “The agreement to believe in a common symbol of value,” as Milch put it, “is really a society trying to find a way to organize itself in some way other than, say, hunting or killing.”

  The man who understood that fact most of all, the man at Deadwood’s center, was the most “anti” of all HBO’s antiheroes—Al Swearengen, the greedy, profane, grasping, murderous, all but prehistoric proprietor of the Gem saloon and whorehouse.

  “While I agree with you that gold is worth $20 an ounce, my gift is not for prospecting, because I don’t like water freezing my nuts,” Swearengen said in the vulgarized, bordering-on-Elizabethan voice that closely mimicked his creator’s. “But I will bring you women, and to the extent that we agree on the value of the gold, then a woman sucking your cock or doing one or another thing is worth gold in the amount of X, Y, or Z.”

  Milch added, “And that’s how the town of Deadwood”—and, by extension, society—“is born.”

  Swearengen was played by Ian McShane with a ferocity that must have shocked an older generation of British viewers who knew the actor as a kindly, crime-solving country antiques dealer on the long-running series Lovejoy. (Equal cognitive dissonance would have greeted Americans had the role gone to Milch’s reported first choice, Ed O’Neill, best known as Al Bundy on Married . . . with Children.)

  Pitted against Swearengen—and those elements of Swearengen in himself—was Timothy Olyphant’s Seth Bullock, a former Montana marshal pulled reluctantly into the same role in Deadwood. Bullock was precisely the kind of character—the taciturn, duty-bound, unflinching lawman—who would have automatically been the hero of the films or TV shows previously made at Melody Ranch. Yet in keeping with the rules of the new TV, it was almost possible to forget he existed.

  Swearengen and Bullock, like many of Deadwood’s characters, were historical figures into which Milch breathed his particular brand of life. So was Wild Bill Hickok, who arrived in Deadwood in the show’s pilot, the very picture of ruined, worn-out American celebrity. Even those familiar with the historical record—and, by now, the tendencies of HBO series—were shocked to see him gunned down at a poker table in the fourth episode, the death as sudden, brutish, and inglorious as Omar Little’s would be in The Wire a few years later.

  Around the central characters was arrayed a panoply of grotesque and damaged souls: the East Coast girl, cosseted in privilege and a morphine habit, until perversely blossoming in Deadwood’s primordial soup; the epileptic preacher; the shattered doctor, clinging to his sense of duty; the whores sold as little girls and now doing the same to others, an entire citizenry of lost, orphaned, and brutalized children—including Swearengen himself. All, despite the lofty rhetoric about Gold, God, and other capitalized Big Ideas, were caught up in the same affairs that consumed the characters in The Sopranos, or Six Feet Under, or Rescue Me: death and love, parenthood and power, loss and longing, and, above all, the search—usually frustrated—for some form of human connection, down in the muck.

  • • •

  With the reduced pace of twelve episodes instead of twenty-two, the limits of shooting on the ranch, and a sober Milch (he claimed to have been fully clean since 1999), the Deadwood set wasn’t as frantic and insane as NYPD Blue’s had been. But the process was no less bizarre. Once again, cast and crew would gather, many days, with little sense of what they would be shooting. The director Ed Bianchi showed up for his first assignment on Deadwood and found himself wandering the sets for two days. On the third, he had lunch with Milch, who asked how things were going. “I said, “To tell you the truth, I’m a little anxious. I’ve been here for two days now and I haven’t seen a script.’ He said, ‘Oh, I can’t help you with that.’ That was his little joke.” Nevertheless, Bianchi—who also directed multiple episodes of The Wire—agreed to sign on as a producer for season two. “He does write scripts late, but what makes it okay is that he’ll sit down with you and tell you what the story you’re going to do is. Then he writes that same story. He knows what he’s going to do, he just hasn’t put it on paper yet. He’s totally functional.”

  Nor was Milch insensitive to the demands of production. If, for instance, certain actors were on call for a particular week, or certain sets were out of commission, he would write to fit his producers’ needs. “We’d say, ‘It would be good if we could shoot in the Gem all day.’ So he would write scenes for the Gem. And a lot of times one of those scenes might be a three-quarter-page monologue that Ian would have to deliver and that he’d get the night before. He’d come in knowing it fucking cold. It’s an English acting thing,” Bianchi said.

  In guiding actors, Milch was more likely to deliver historical context—say, on nineteenth-century views of medicine—than concrete notes. The actor Garret Dillahunt, who first played Wild Bill’s killer and then the character Francis Wolcott, was given and asked to study 190 pages of biographical material about a sixteenth-century heretic named Paracelsus. “None of it ever appeared,” he said. At the same time, Milch could seem genuinely open to—even dependent on—what his actors brought to the table. Often, character details were drawn from the real-life production—as though the band of actors, writers, and crew people out in Santa Clarita were itself a microcosmic gold rush town. Once, he observed the actor Dayton Callie self-consciously showing off a new coat to crew members. Transposed onto Callie’s character, Charlie Utter, the new coat became a metaphor for Utter’s changing role in the community.

  “I didn’t know Charlie Utter until I knew Dayton Callie playing Charlie Utter,” he once wrote.

  How you experienced working with Milch depended much on your own personality, said Mark Tinker, who followed him from NYPD Blue to Deadwood. “If you’re an actor who can’t go with the flow, you’re fucked. If you’re a producer who must have everything in order, you’re fucked.
But if you can relate to the creative process and you get enthralled with David’s brain and his approach to work and the heart that he exhibits, then you’re going to be fine.” He paused. “For a while.”

  Tinker himself reached the outer limit of his ability to work with Milch during the filming of John from Cincinnati, the inscrutable and brief follow-up to Deadwood.

  “I’d had enough. So, we went for a little walk around the Deadwood lot, which was where we were also shooting John. I said, ‘David, I gotta go eat McDonald’s for a while.’ His work was just too rich a meal for me to comprehend and digest. No day was ever the same. You never knew what was going to set him off, what was going to please him. . . . I needed something where I knew what it was going to taste like every day,” he said.

  At the time of this retelling, Tinker was executive producer of Private Practice, an hour-long spin-off of Grey’s Anatomy, about oversexed doctors in Los Angeles. So, how did McDonald’s taste?

  “Be careful what you wish for,” he said.

  • • •

  If all showrunner-writer relationships, fraught as they are with approval and rejection, discipline and reward, take on a distinctly Freudian tinge, it’s no surprise that Milch’s were especially susceptible. He explicitly fostered a mentor-mentee, if not outright paternal, dynamic with chosen writers, telling Mills, for instance, that he would teach him everything he knew, until the younger man had had enough and was forced to leave. His professional relationships were particularly intense with the female writers who came into his orbit. Theresa Rebeck, after detailing the many crimes of “Caligula,” turned more self-reflective: “I both loved and hated this guy. I was desperate for him to think highly of my writing. . . . I needed to pretend that anything he wrote on a napkin was vastly more brilliant than anything I might write, ever, because it was simply true,” she wrote. “For months [after leaving the job] I wallowed in the confusion of wondering whether I was any good as a writer and why I couldn’t get Caligula to see that I really did have the talent and ability to be a great writer of his show. Why couldn’t I get Caligula to value me and treat me with just a shred more respect so that I could have stayed and let him destroy me more?”

  Others had a very different, though equally loaded, experience. Regina Corrado was another New York playwright lured to Los Angeles to write for TV. At the recommendation of a friend, she wound up in the Deadwood writers’ room. From the beginning, she felt immense, loving support from Milch. “I can’t say enough wonderful things about him. He just so effortlessly changed my life,” she said. She was aware enough to note the personal significance of starting to work on the show the same year she lost her father, who happened to also be a charming, highly educated drinker. (“You’ve been training for this job your whole life,” one of her sisters said.)

  And she could see Milch’s potential to be more brutal—particularly with male writers. She and fellow writer Liz Sarnoff would watch writers walk away from meetings with the showrunner, shoulders slumped, and half joke to each other, “Another spirit broken.”

  “He was more liberal with his abuse of men, in a way,” she said, invoking a Deadwood scene in which Swearengen slaps another man across the face and tells him, “See that? It didn’t kill ya!” “He was saying, ‘You take your beatings like a man and give some back. It doesn’t have to be that your ego gets crushed every time.”

  But none of this diminished her sense of genuine connection, whether it was sitting in Milch’s office, watching him work—“I remember once, he wrote this line for Calamity Jane, ‘Every day takes figuring out how to live again,’ and he turned around to me with tears in his eyes”—or accompanying him to the track and picking up his winnings, in one case $90,000 in a paper sack.

  The angriest Milch ever got with her, Corrado said, was when she tried to get out of moving up to become an on-set producer. “Get the fuck out of my office!” he told her, furious that she would turn down the opportunity for which he had groomed her. After working on John from Cincinnati, Corrado left to work on another, more traditionally run show, but she thought often of her days with Milch.

  “I miss it. It was always so filled with excitement,” she said. “But Liz told me, ‘Once you leave David, you can’t go back.’ You can’t be in that world if you’re not in that world. You can go back and visit, but it’s never the same.’ He used to say it was the killing off of the father. You have to kill him off.”

  • • •

  Milch’s feelings about working with others were as complicated as everything else about him. This was a battle every modern showrunner faced in one way or the other: the push and pull of auteurship and collaboration. Few scenes could embody it more vividly and literally than Milch’s method of composition. It was practically a piece of performance art on the theme. He had begun developing the process as far back as Hill Street Blues and had fully refined it by Deadwood. And he was well aware of what it looked like to an outsider.

  “This will be easy to dismiss if you think it’s just an ego trip,” he warned a visitor about to observe the same process on the HBO series Luck, which premiered in 2012. “But it’s not. It’s something else.”

  A group of Luck’s writers, interns, and various others, predominantly young and female, were waiting for Milch outside a darkened room in his Santa Monica offices. They resembled vestal virgins. Milch entered, arranged some cushions, and lowered himself to the floor. He assumed a position to accommodate his bad back: head propped up on one arm, one leg bent awkwardly at the knee so that the foot faced upward. It was not unlike an especially awkward male pinup pose.

  In front of Milch, at eye level, was a computer screen. At a desk to his right sat a typist/transcriber and the assigned writer of that episode’s script, taking notes. The vestal virgins filed in and silently occupied the couch and chairs behind Milch. He called for the writer’s first draft of a scene to be put up on the screen and began to dictate.

  “Is it better ‘This is how church is lately now, too’?” he said. “I like that better.”

  “Yeah,” said the writer.

  “‘This is how church is lately now, too.’ Go forward. Stop. Go forward.” The cursor dutifully followed his directions, and the gallery followed along.

  Milch described this process as “problems of spirit turned into problems of technique.” Laying hands on the keyboard himself, he explained, would be too powerful a trigger for his obsessive-compulsive tendencies. The audience, in addition to witnessing his brilliance, was a kind of disciplinary force, pushing him forward.

  Eventually, he came to a section of scene description, interspersed with a few lines of dialogue, in which several characters—including a trainer named Turo Escalante and a couple of wiseguys, Bernstein and Demitriou—watch a horse, Mon Gateau, deliver a mighty performance on the track. The resulting monologue could have been a lost Samuel Beckett prose poem, in which the disembodied authorial voice labors to get his story just right:

  Lose the rest. Stop, please. Descending toward the . . . Starting toward the winner circle . . . Starting his descent to the winner’s circle. Double dash. Comma. Perfunctorily acknowledging a patron. Double dash. Now the patron’s gonna speak. “Candy comma huh, Turo?” Perfunctorily acknowledging a patron’s congratulations. Starting his descent to the winner’s circle. Descending to the winner’s circle. Stop. Close on Escalante, descending to the winner’s circle, perfunctorily acknowledging. . . . “Candy, huh, Escalante?” Escalante: “He run good, yeah.” Period. “He run good, yeah.” Close on Escalante making his way to the winners’ circle. . . . Lose the “s” in congratulations. “He run good, yeah.” . . . Bernstein and Demitriou. On their feet, watching Mon Gateau gallop out. Far in front of the remainder of the field . . . Of the rest of the field. Far in front of the rest of the field. Double dash. On their feet, comma. Go forward. Lose the rest there. Lose among the horses. Lose and. Lose the last two lines starting with the assistant. G
o forward. Stop.

  Milch was not wrong that the process would appear to an outside observer as a piece of astonishing, self-aggrandizing theater, a kind of religious rite in and of itself, with Milch acting as shaman. The content, though, was remarkably quotidian, consisting largely of the kind of fitful process—adding emphasis here, cutting a word there, then replacing it, then cutting again—that most writers suffer alone and in silence. Likewise, he had a need to express out loud, and record, the larger, underlying thinking—about themes, subtext, resonance, and so forth—that for other writers would remain intuitive, hidden, and unarticulated.

  Just as Milch’s rap eventually began to seem oddly guileless—it was, you came to believe, the only way he knew how to speak—so too did this séance style of writing come to seem like something more than just absurd showmanship: an actual attempt, perhaps informed by the rigors of rehab, to achieve communion with other creative souls—what he referred to as a “going out in spirit.” Corrado once wondered aloud whether she, or any of the other writers, had any effect on the work they were supposedly involved with. Milch stopped and looked her in the eye. “The essence of this work is the essence of you,” he told her.

  When asked if he would prefer, given the luxury of time, to write every episode of a series himself, he admitted that it was a tempting idea.

  “The ‘(b)’ answer is, I’d write it all myself,” he said. “Which is to say that in my vanity and egoism, I would think that that would be the way to proceed. But I know deep down that the better answer is: Even having all the time in the world, it’s better to collaborate with your brothers and sisters. It’s ultimately the richest experience. It’s a much more eventful journey.”